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Preston Novemr 11th 1815

Sir
             When you suggested to me the 2nd Augt. last the proposal of settling a number of the People of Colour on the escheated Lands in Preston, I readily embraced the Idea as what would be beneficial to the place in general and eventually to myself in particular; it will I doubt not be in your recollection, that on the disbanding of several Regiments in Halifax in 1783 and the retiring of the body of those Regts. to the parts of the Province assigned to them for settlements, the refuse of those Regts. remained behind, a Nuisance in the Streets of the Town; late in the Autumn of that year Governor Parr directed me to take two Hundred of them unto the lands now called Preston, where a settlement had already been begun by a few Loyalists who came here from New York under my direction, to take Provisions both for the Loyalists and those Soldiers and to issue it to them weekly upon condition of their remaining on the Lands which he had ordered me under the direction of the Surveyor General to Survey into Lotts for them. A number of those Soldiers, in the course of the ensuing year left the place, and an Hundred and twenty who remained, together with the Loyalists just mentioned and a few Blacks who had followed the Army — were the Hundred and Sixty-one Persons included in the Grant with me in Decr. 1784. Those Soldiers, confined to these Lands as the condition of receiving Rations, built a few miserable Huts in which they remained eating the King's Provision while any was allowed to them, then sold their lands for a trifle, or abandoned them unsold, as did likewise the above mentioned Blacks on their being inveigled away to Siera Leona, and those Lands have lain now more than Thirty years unimproved to the great discouragement, and very obvious